Search

Archives

Tag: firefox

Suddenly i had the problem that Firefox redirected sometimes to a wysiwyg:// page. It seems to be some caching problem and with some users it dissapeared by changing DNS servers. It’s strange, have not seen it before:

update: found it! I enabled disqus on the site I experiened it on. After I disabled the WordPress plugin, it no longer appeared the be the case. Which means: any website out there using disqus could probably do the same thing. (or… any website using the same caching trick).

So let’s see if there is something about this on the disqus website. Hmmm.. nothing. But, I think it is this setting:

it probably pre-processes the links on my page and the redirects to that page.

“Firefox update mechanism requires that the certificate used by the web site that provides the update information be the certificate that Mozilla has purchased and this prevents certain types of attacks. If there are 5 failures in a row the notification is displayed. Some proxy software spoofs the certificate used to connect to secure web sites which is likely what is going on here. “

Well… that’s the end of Firefox 64 bit builds for Microsoft. If you are running it… don’t forget to update manually to the new 32 bit version. (p.s. just after I found out that I always updated my 64 bit Java plugin but neglected the 32 bit Java plugin …).

The number 1 Firefox add-on is AdBlock Plus with 166 million downloads. IMHO …. it is a good add-on (because I use it) (together with do-not-track-plus) but … it is a bad add-on because … website makers don’t earn money anymore from ads that are blocked by AdBlock Plus

1. main reason: memory usage : one of my laptops used to have only 2 gig of memory and I noticed that (the new) versions of Firefox used much less memory than other browsers. And you really start noticing when you hit “the memory limit”: things freeze up. I think I left Firefox because of memory problems but things seem to have turned around. (and yes there was also lots of other stuff running on the laptop).

2. second reason: copy – paste images as data url: when you “blog” it is much easier using either Windows Live Writer or WordPress to use Firefox when inserting images since the other browsers put a direct link to the image on the clipboard, which is not so nice to the webmaster when you are leeching images and thus bandwidth from their sites. So with Chrome I always have to copy to a tool like Irfanview first and then from Irfanview to the blog utility. And that is not so handy. Really not so handy if you blog around a lot.

3. I still think the web developer tools and add-ons of Firefox are handier and more extensive. Maybe I’ve gotten used to them since other browser offer similar functionality.

4. Profiles – I have a lot of them and I backup my profiles and I have gotten quite used to them.

So … are there no negative things? Yes there are

1. Firefox “feels” unsafer than Chrome. As far as I read various blogs of which I cannot judge how deep these tests are, probably Chrome is “safer”.

2. Using Gmail it’s quite handy to have the default e-mail client on my private machines automatically open gmail as default client

2. IE 9 is so mature, also from a development point of view, that I feel guilty not using it whenever I see it but then again, all Mozilla software is open source “MPL”. And I really like xPL. (disclaimer: as long as the open source products provide all the same functionality as in (my) requirements otherwise I favor the better product)

I wrote a new php class that exports my firefox sqlite favorites database to a set of url files.

Which works great. The handy thing is that I now can version this set of url files (using subversion, git and / or clearcase) and also export out of chrome (using sync.sqlite3) and internet explorer to the same directory. I can also manually drag and drop stuff and, if the version system does its work they all should in sync (e.g. clearcase keeps track of moved files AND directories since each element gets a unique id just as in git where a file gets a unique hash).

So you see the list of folders:

and inside each folder the list of bookmark URL files:

and inside each of the URL files:

For the favicons I decided to not put them in the main structure but in a favicon folder (yeah I really like pharaos)

I can now just doubleclick such an icon and it opens in my browser, so it works pretty much as if I would open my bookmark folder with the difference that I can use total commander to manage them and that my browser does not carry around tens of megabytes of urls in its database I can now manage my urls offline and independent of browser and well… carry them around.

I think i will make one main dir "home" and one main dir "work" for starters a directory per contact is the next step.

I have some TODO points on my list though which I should add:

a. The dividers could be easily also created (using — , —-, —–, —— ) but the problem is what happens when I re-run the export. In this case I should check if it exists and if it exists it will do nothing. not nice. I could also check for the firefox database id but that would make it rely too much on Firefox. I have to think about this I think I will delete all dividers IF the directory is encountered and then recreate them with the logic that if a source has the same directory name it probably knows about those dividers too. (to bad there is no divider support in native Windows Explorer).

b. I need to add export functionality as well to a variety of export sources e.g. a firefox html page that I can export in a clean firefox

c. the physical storage has some dependencies e.g. when i delete a bookmark also its favicon should be cleared

d. i would like more representations of the data on there just physical on the disk e.g. com.google. so in the directory com i want all com domains i bookmarked

e. i also want a representation per tag so i can compare if the way i stored them is in line with the way everyone stores them this probably means i will have to query e.g. delicious, stumbleupon, alexa, dmoz and zillions of other tag bookmark systems for the most used tags (AND related tags) and check if they way "they" propose it is in line with how i would want it. That point brings up a million thoughts: why not just download all urls out there already nicely stored… and as soon as I tag it, it will just become highlighted in the millions of urls…. a gazillion things i could do here. but i don’t have the time I was also thinking: why not only tags but check out other taxonomies as well… something todo in the future.

f. i also want to add some additional tooling like ‘check for duplicates’ and/or ‘top tags’ (to see what i find interesting)

g. i also need to add more import sources also e.g. a sql dump from my weblog and auto-get all urls that i ever put in there.

h. when all of that is finished i want to wrap it in a nicer webshell with multiple representations and tools.

i. there is a workflow to follow ofcourse, after exporting preferably all urls are cleared from the bookmarks and in the next run only the "\todo" folder in the bookmarks should be exported or something like that.

j. what i would really like is a sidebar in firefox that is actually a view on my directory of URL files… but what i can do anyway is drag the folders containing the url files in the firefox bookmark bar so that i can still easily "click"

h. directories also contain descriptions. I will probably add an descript.ion file in the folder itself.

In the PC-Active of this month (a Dutch PC magazine) I read about the Tree Style Tab extension for Firefox. It moves the tabs so it can become a left hand column style of tabs (although you can drag it anywhere) AND it presents it in a tree format, which means that you have a much more ordered view on your tabs. It was created by Piro, who has made a lot of other Firefox extensions.

I prefer to have my tabs on the left hand column. So..I’m glad I could add this add-on to my Firefox essential add-on list

☞ after installing it absolutely try out the "options" (in the Add-on menu) since you will get dozens of options to make the thing work exactly as you like it e.g. give it the style you like. (I choose the metallic theme with auto-hide).

☞ notice that your brain has been trained to go the top of the screen, so it will take you a day to train your brain that it is now on the left.

p.s. if you use Windows and would like also your Taskbar items on the left hand side use TLB.